skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You might also like this Less Wrong essay:

"Defecting by accident is lacking the awareness, tact, and skill to realize what the secondary effects of your actions are and act accordingly to win."

http://lesswrong.com/lw/372/defecting_by_accident_a_flaw_com...
(from the Arstechnica article, not the OP's)

> The company's internal tools have a Facebook-inspired mechanism that Rossi uses to keep score. Facebook's developers all have a "karma" rating that is tracked through the code review system. Rossi can increase or decrease a developer's karma by clicking on thumbs-up and thumbs-down icons that appear next to the developer's name in a Web-based dashboard.

> The thumbs-up icon in Rossi's tool is the same one used for the "like" function on the social networking site. The thumbs-down image is the same icon, but upside down. When Rossi showed me the icons, he joked that he's the only person in the world who has a Facebook "dislike" button.

To me this was the most interesting part that whole piece. I've long thought Facebook could do with a "dislike" button for everyone. Keep it private, but let it affect what you see from whom, and how.
Possibly Riderbee, since IIRC they are similar to sidecar and lyft. Zimride and Ridejoy operate like a traditional bulletin board so they should be fine.

When you're dispatching drivers in real time, just like a taxi dispatcher, the law can interpret you as one. The passenger is entrusting the service to assure the driver is safe. That's not a responsibility that the government wants to bestow upon a non-registered entity.
That's a myopic view of economics. How could it improve things to have the group with all the money leave, taking it with them?
F1 racing is not a game, it is a major global industry. The top driver makes something like $40 million a year. Many of the advances we see in regular cars are designed and tested in those high performance vehicles.

But more importantly htf funds do not stop anyone from participating in the markets, it just harder and riskier to do so. Accounting firms had massive staffs with hundreds of binders and files for each client. Accounting software eliminated most of that. Were accountants talking about the unfair advantage that Intuit had, and how normal accountants couldn't make a living anymore? Probably. Welcome to the future.
Are you saying that HFTs have no impact on Alice and Bob regardless of how prudent they are about investing? In addition to ETFs Alice and Bob also have market exposure through a company 401k. Are the 401k managers and ETF managers immune to the effects of the HFTs?

On the page[1] first documenting this algo NANEX says the following:

"We believe that this algo will continue to grow and if left unchecked, could very well contribute to the next flash crash because it removes precious network capacity and provides zero economic value such as price discovery."

Do you disagree?

[1] http://www.nanex.net/aqck2/3610.html
All of your fonts are too small. All of your text colors are too gray. I'm in my early 30's with fairly good eyesight, and its just way too hard to read anything on your site. I tried signing up and going through the Sell services bit, but just gave up because the whole thing gives me a physical headache trying to read anything.
The eight useful polynomial approximations of `sinf(3)'
The regulation to ensure a minimal level of competence is a driver's license and the regulation to ensure recompense is (as you mention) insurance. Both of which are required of every driver whether a taxi or not. The regulations on taxis exist to protect taxi owners.

And yes it is clear that Uber and Lyft are taxi services.
Pinterest wasn't the first use of masonry, and any use of masonry isn't necessarily aping pinterest. Digg doesn't look or feel much like pinterest, neither does the verge (which seems to be quite successful). If anything, they appear to mimic traditional newspaper layouts. Digg is unsuccessful because its content is mediocre - not because it's using a layout that's un-conducive to displaying news.

I would argue that the assertion that news sites should be a dense list of headlines is false, and that Reddit and Hacker News thrive DESPITE their layouts rather than because of them. Making elements on a page visually distinct and easy to scan is not a bad thing.
Even if trades were only executed daily, wouldn't a futures market develop that was traded at the millisecond level anyway?
What happens when we try to walk in a straight line blindfolded
I think your example illustrates the surprises of compound growth well, but with a realistic growth of 4.1% per year, twin A ends up with a pot of $88k and twin B ends up with $183k. So your example provides food for thought but probably shouldn't form the basis for a retirement strategy.
New title is much better.
Uber is in an entirely different legal category. All of their drivers are registered. Their main issue is essentially a turf war between limos and taxis.

Lyft and sidecar are being accused of enabling unregistered professional transportation.
They probably refer to breakaway panel fairings above the engine isolation armor. Space X has an armor "cup"around the dangerous parts of the engine, and put fittings on top of that for some reason; aero probably.

Their statement suggests these came off when pressures radically changed during engine cut off, which is plausible. It was at max aerodynamic pressure, and removing all the pressure the motor generates is a big swing. I find it more likely that the nozzle (bell) shattered, as it is more exposed to both aero and combustion pressures. Maybe both happened.

A visual guide:

1) naked engine: http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2355/2230438397_487afd40a2.jp...

When a liquid engine fails energetically, it's usually going to be a failure in the chamber. Nozzle or throat burn-through or other failure may also happen. The turbo pump might also let go and shred some stuff nearby. Plumbing failures may also kill the engine, but not destroy much; there are plenty of valves to fix leakage before it gets bad.

2) un faired: http://www.spacenews.com/images/Falcon9engines_SpaceX02.jpg

Here you can see the armored tub around the chamber section of each engine. It is meant to contain any problems. Mostly these would be hot gas from holes burned in the chamber or throat, fuel or oxidizer from leaks in the plumbing, or shrapnel from the turbo pump coming apart. Note that the other major failure mode, excessive vibration, cannot be armored against, but that is more a design thing than a random failure.

Most to all of these failures are easily detected by various pressure and flow sensors, and usually before they become big problems. Turn off the propellant valves, and the engine rapidly becomes safe, though off. But the armor does keep the neighbors safe from any problems, presuming it holds.
I would guess it is good enough for most failures.

3) faired vehicle: http://www.brendans-island.com/blogsource/20101015ff/falcon-...

Here you can see pretty white fairings hiding everything but the nozzles. Note that they appear to be a bunch of different pieces. Probably that is because they are meant to break away individually if something goes wrong.

Those are what I think the statement refers to. I doubt they are actively jettisoned, but may certainly be designed to pop off in an over-pressure situation. One could probably compare vs the video to see if the pieces look like that, the nozzle, or other engine parts. The corner fairing might also have failed under some circumstances.

Having seen the video in slow mo a few times, I think their assessment is plausible. Probably they will be able to tell what happened by telemetry. I don't know if they are still trying to recover stages, but if they are, they might get their hands in some physical evidence. Whether we will ever see any of this data, though, I don't know. They've been reasonably open in the past.
Excellent write up, I was hoping Nanex had some info on this. Tangentially related, The Rise of the HFT Machines is another great Nanex article that argues how it's not so much HF trading that threatens market stability, it's the HF quoting[1].

There are some great charts illustrating how every time exchanges increase quote processing capacity the HF algos gobble up the new bandwidth, but ultimately the number of executed trades has remained relatively consistent over the past five years.

[1]http://www.nanex.net/aqck/2804.HTML
Microsoft Is Finally Fixing the Dumbest Thing About Microsoft
Pinterest works for the average Pinterest user primarily because it fits into the metaphor of the site (items pinned on a bulletin board) and therefore enhances the information architecture of the site. This acts as a functional multiplier across the entire site. The fact that the content is visual falls out from this but is not necessary; many pinned items are actually primarily textual. Sign up flow, email notifications, etc are tertiary.

Generally, a non-traditional layout (where traditional is flat list or tree-based) should be chosen if it is compatible with or can even reinforce the information architecture. E.g. if you're site is based on the idea of building a house out of bricks, a 'mason' layout would work :)
Reducing the trading increment is what a futures market does anyway (you can buy contracts to remove the volatility of second/minute/daily activity).
Perhaps they dislike it because it's bullshit! How is my value to a company determined by how much I get paid historically?
When you are wondering what value the "suit" should bring to a partnership, it is experience in what not to do in cases like this and how to recover when you do run into them. Better yet, a good "suit" will make sure that your business success isn't determined by a singular launch event (which is almost always a bad idea for startups).

Sometimes you can recover without that (great job on the recovery!), sometimes you can't. If you choose your "suit" right, your chances of recovery will be better.
My guess is that the gap year concept is actually unusual in most of the world. As far as I know it's very uncommon in Asia, where the closest thing is studying abroad for a year.
Ask HN: The acquisition value of a codebase
I'm just wondering what value a clean and well designed code base has on an acquisition. I'm sure it varies by technology, product, team size, and acquisition value, but how important is clear well documented and tested code in an acquisition?

aka: when do you put effort into cleaning up the scrappy mvp rather than iterating on new product ideas and user tests.
I tried to use Paypal for the first time in a year about a month ago. Tried to add funds from a bank account I had confirmed through their process years ago and which has been linked to the account for ages. This transaction caused them to suspend much of my account until I could provide them with photocopies of all three of my license, social security card and a utility bill with my current address.

According to their instructions none of these documents could be older than 6 months. Somehow they expect me to have a driver's license and social security card neither of which is older than 6 months. I'm sure I could have called them and cleared up the matter after wasting an hour or more dealing with their support, but instead I just said fuck it and decided not to use Paypal anymore.

Fuck you, Paypal.
It makes a lot of sense to penalize that kind of behavior. Deliberately slowing down the quote feed or cancelling all your trades seems to be intended as a denial of service attack on your competitors.
How does having a greater number of investors doing "active trading" (which I assume means day trading) make society better off than having fewer?

By this same logic society was better off having more people employed over turning dirt by hand in fields..
That used to motivate me too. But when I found myself in a job where my work no longer made that happen, I quit and changed careers (mid-40s). I just turned 50 and I am in my third year teaching high-school math, physics and computer science. It's like being born again.
The whole point of Flipboard is to add a magazine layout to existing content. As important is the fact that Flipboard allows you to choose what content sources to apply their layout to. In this regard, it leaves the whole issue in the hands of the user, who is always right :)
Responding to a dead comment by stallker:

stallker 4 hours ago | link [dead]

Why 'f * ing'? (Sorry, I'm italian... of course I know the meaning of the word, but I would like to know why do you use it for Paul Lutus, TIA)

I'm not the OP, but in some circles the four-letter expletive is used to emphasize the importance or intensity of something. E.g. "William [freaking] Shatner" means the original, unique, William Shatner, not some other William Shatner. "So [freaking] good!" means extremely good.
Neversoft Artist Seeking Help With Mother's Apparent Murder
Try the Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure drinking game. There's only a few rules, like "Excellent" and air-guitar.
Yes.

My take on it is if there is no/little benefit of putting something in the cloud, there is no reason to do so particularly if it's something security related.
I believe the origin is in medicine. My wife introduced the idea too me 10 years ago. In medical practice, watch out for the doctor who's been practicing the same year of medicine over and over and over.
Naming Agile Sprints
The Non-Euclidean Geometry of Whales
HTTPS Everywhere 3.0 protects 1,500 more sites
The problem is if they take the young gifted entrepreneurs with them. I heard anecdotally that they were already leaving e.g. for London and that was before this latest tax increase.
That's not false - capitalism is justified by it's proponents by it's ability to serve the public better than socialism (the majority of the public wants more socialism - entitlements/public services etc). Some aspects of capitalism (copyrights, patents, HFT, pollution) are not serving the public and there are valid arguments from the opposing side.

My goal is to trade daily/weekly (in addition to monthly/yearly). I don't want to seconds/minutes/hours (and so can't many others - so the "competitiveness" of markets is actually reduced).

Ultimately, stock markets exist to raise funds for projects (exits for entrepreneurs, financing projects in large corps) - they occur on the daily-years timeframe, not seconds/minutes/hours.
>Indeed HFTs provide the benefit that during times of crisis they provide plenty of sell side liquidity...

Any proof to that claim? Liquidity evaporated during the flash crash. The SLPs have no obligation to provide liquidity and can simply pull the plug when the market is in crisis. [1][2]

[1]http://finance.yahoo.com/mbview/threadview/?m=tm&bn=228&...
[2]http://compoundingmyinterests.com/compounding-the-blog/2012/...
I was a lifer Sysadmin until I was 40 and learned Ruby on Rails. I've always had an unprovable theory that Sysadmin always results in a fork in the career path: management or programming, and I didn't see myself in management. I'm self-taught and was accepted for Startup School this year, and while I'm not quite where I want to be, I think programming and creating with an awareness of the system side of things is a better direction for me to go in.

You can also always program on the side if you want to maintain the stability of an established career.
16 Brilliant Insights From Steve Jobs Keynote Circa 1997
So, requests come into the trading system and there's no tracability? No credentials? No security? I'm not very religious, but heaven help us if this is the state of the Wall Street automation!
This article makes me incredibly angry, and I think I've figured out why. This sort of thing masquerades as a transgressive act, but it serves to reinforce the notion that the lives of working adults are drudgery, and that, every so often, we need a break from it all. People who can afford this sort of thing are already in the highest caste in the US. And don't tell me that those programs that provide stipends aren't seriously competitive - I'm willing to bet the majority of those admitted don't need the money.

Here's a great example of such a program: Where There Be Dragons[1]. The very name is racist and archaically antipodean. I'm sure it's a great honor to be a Dragon, and the name really pops on that college application!

This is not an indictment of cultural exchange, but of hedonism and signalling pretending to be any type of worthwhile exchange. I'm sure that some people do meaningful work and somehow find themselves by switching tasks or locales. But I'm willing to bet that more than a few are disingenuous, and this article actively encourages that sort of behavior.

[1] http://www.wheretherebedragons.com
tl;dr: it's a slime mold which avoids spreading where it has already spread (which are 'slimed' - a chemical marker, at the very least).

That might be stretching "external memories" a bit far, for hype's sake. Not that slime molds aren't fascinating, but what's with the hyperbolic word choices?
But, isn't Consensus meant to be good for the company?
The Chinese God of Wealth for Sale
Groupon And Zynga Are The Worst-Performing Stocks Of The Year
The challenge of developing a capability
I'm curious about the 2nd item. I'm ambivalent about it. On the one hand I bicycle into work (20 miles each way) and do most of my problem solving and thinking on the way in. But what is the value of having an employee live 50 miles away and driving for 1.5 hours each way (I used to do that too)?
I plan on moving to SV and working for a startup, then launching my own venture one day. I feel like this is an easier transition and I'll be able to accumulate some more experience and assets before I develop something on my own.
(I mean trading in daily/weekly - not intra-day)

Concentrating trading in a few hands is the problem we had - too big to fail. HFT will lead to barriers to new entrants (because of increasing startup costs).
How can we avoid eating hacked (genetically modified) food?
Californians will soon be voting on Prop 37 [1] and may become the first state in the US to require labelling of food which contains genetically modified ingredients. Over 50 countries already require this. Personally I think the jury is still out on the long term effects of GM food on humans [2][3] so labelling will be helpful to anyone who would like to avoid GM food but found it difficult.

It's easy for some things. I love Kettle Chips and they already label themselves as being made from "non-GMO ingredients". However, when it comes to buying groceries, it seems the "organic" label isn't enough, and you have to look for "100% organic" [4], so just grabbing stuff at Whole Foods is no good.

Eating out is obviously much harder. For example, Burgermeister use Niman Ranch beef where the cattle themselves dine out on hacked food. "Unfortunately, use of GMOs is now prevalent in the U.S., and cross-contamination of non-GMO fields due to wind drift from genetically modified crops does sometimes occur." [5]. I don't think I've ever seen a restaurant menu declare a dish to be GM free.

If you try to avoid GM food, how do you make it easier on yourself? Do you eat at home more? Do you use any apps or websites with lists of products confirmed to be GM free?

[1] http://www.carighttoknow.org/

[2] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2205509/Cancer-row-GM-foods-French-study-claims-did-THIS-rats--cause-organ-damage-early-death-humans.html

[3] http://www.nature.com/news/rat-study-sparks-gm-furore-1.11471

[4] http://www.nongmoshoppingguide.com/what-is-organic.html

[5] http://www.nimanranch.com/faq.aspx
I don't see how that contradicts.
As a German scientist, you had a choice: try to disappear and abandon your work, go work with the Americans in Alabama or wherever, or go work with the Soviets.

My guess is that threats weren't necessary in most cases,
> I've long thought Facebook could do with a "dislike" button for everyone. Keep it private...

Well, we all know why this wouldn't ever see the light of day /snark

Facebook would do well to implement something like this, but it would never be private, at least to advertisers. Maybe from other people, but that takes more work then just making it visible.
This is a really dumb way of looking at it. Capital markets are a tool - they are a means, not an end. They are a tool society uses to allocate resources in a sane, equitable, and efficient way. To the extent they accomplish this (and they generally do a rather great job at it), they are a useful tool. To the extent they don't, we are justified in altering the way they function so as to achieve the results we desire. They are an organizational strategy, nothing more.

What they are certainly not, is some higher order of intelligence or ideal that we humans just have to learn to live with, or else. The stock market may not owe me anything, but it certainly owes us something, or we wouldn't use it.
Did you read the article? Uber is definitely not being served hear, and they don't call themselves a ride sharing services.

Besides that, I agree with your point about these services really being car's for hire, but calling themselves ride sharing services.
Lodsys Offers Update on In-App Purchase Patent Dispute
For many years George Soros has been suggesting that a tiny tax on transactions would eliminate a huge amount of high frequency bullshit (he was suggesting it for currency markets, but the same applies here). I think he proposed that the revenue generated could fund the UN... It's about the same Bill Gates's suggestion of charging a penny to send an email -- no impact on legitimate use and a serious impediment to spammers.
One of Zynga’s Top Businesses Is Swimming Away
Consensus is rarely good for the company, or the product. It just allows people to live in peace, without dealing with the loud, obnoxious, and wrong ones.

(Corollary - if you do a lot of deciding by consensus, it's your hiring that failed you)
Nice to see that someone is actually trying to bring some order to the current HTML5 chaos: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/SteveFulton/20120926/178364/N...
An insightful post indeed. Working in a large organization, I agree that developing a new capability is difficult firm wide. What we prefer to do is developing it piece meal. I have tried this in one or two projects and it has worked well. The developers that initially develop the capability help bring other developers to speed. Building a robust knowledge repository is of utmost importance in such cases. Also, it won't hurt to designate a person as a single point of contact to implement the change (aka building a capability) across the organization.
Buy side liquidity means quick access to sellers at little cost and on favourable terms to you. This was always the case - HFTs just make it faster and easier.

So if you are a buyer in a crisis - you get a better deal with HFTs quickly matching supply/demand of large stock orders. If you are a seller - you're screwed either way - HFT or not (see history).
I'm not blaming PayPal for this, I agree I was not aware of this ToS, I am just making the point that they are pushing away legitimate business because of this policy.

But I doubt you can call it unforgivable. You can't tell me you have read every single ToS to every single service you have signed up to in full and detail. PayPal makes it more clear on their signup about this these days but I signed up a few years ago. It wasn't as clearly spelt out.
Or the pin that pops it.
The tablet office: are businesses ready for Windows 8?
"Don't you worry, we got everything you need here in the Company Store! So, get back to work!"
Pretty snazzy, more people need to use stuff like this!

The only thing thats missing is documentation of how user data is kept segmented away & secure from others. One of the greatest pitfalls of "cloud solutions" is that data security is pretty weak but if this is just SAAS and these guys are "doing it right" its not that big of a deal.